Tag: Jürgen Habermas

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Critical Theory

A critical approach within Geography and Placemaking has, for me, always been a key objective for understanding the world and contributing this knowledge to creating a better world. This is what most people believe to be the basic principle of all sciences. Therefore, on a rather intuitive and superficial level, this might sound self-evident. At a bit deeper level, however, it shows that there is a substantial debate about what such a critical approach is all about and how it should be applied. See e.g. my earlier entry on the Difficulties with Critical Geography.

Recently, I was reading a recently published book (in German) on Phenomenology and Critical Theory (2026), edited by Alexis Gros, Jochen Dreher, and Hartmut Rosa, and stumbled over a very accessible overview of this debate on Critical Approaches, written by Prof. Gustavo Leyva, a brief summary of which I would like to share with you here.

I. Horkheimer’s Programme

The term Critical Theory in philosophy and the social sciences was coined by Max Horkheimer, building on the earlier work of Georg Lukács, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin, in his inaugural speech upon becoming director of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in 1931. He defined the main objective of the Institute as researching and understanding the collective fate of humanity and society. Instead of focusing on individual phenomena, it aimed to examine these phenomena in the context of and in relation to broader structural societal and historical aspects. In contrast to earlier ideas of critique, his understanding and theorising was also itself seen as part of this relation. Traditional theory attempts to analyse reality from a distanced and neutral point of view, to make recommendations which are expected to improve our objective knowledge and possibilities for action. As such, traditional theory is firmly rooted in the thinking of the idealistic ‘I’ (Kant, Fichte) and in the logical historic processes (Hegel), irrespective of real societal experiences and practices. In Horkheimer’s view, however, social research itself was seen as partly determined by concrete societal conditions, as part of societal practice and historical processes. Social science lost its innocence and neutrality, and from thereon would and should play an important role not just in understanding the societal conditions of social phenomena but also in changing these conditions, aiming to improve social relations as well as relations with the material environment. The critical reflection on societal processes, therefore, does not take place in a purely intellectual sphere, but rather is embedded in a web of struggles over certain ways of life in reality.

Understood in this way, Critical Theory does not so much advocate the accumulation of knowledge for its own sake but rather the emancipation of human beings from enslaving conditions. Critical Theory is therefore a theory guided by the concern that subjects should constitute themselves as conscious subjects and that society should become an association of free human beings, in which they can actively determine their own ways of life, based on the vision of a society in which justice prevails in relations between people. In this way, the critique proceeds not transcendentally but immanently, by demonstrating how the project of emancipation, which guides it, is already present in the structure and dynamics of social actions and interactions, in social practices, and in the existing struggles and forms of organisation and structuration (Leyva, 2026, p. 173). Critical Theory combines the theoretic and reflective view of the thinker from a distance based on reason and rationality with the immediate closeness to the actual social processes, experiences, feelings and social representations of concrete groups of people and actors, in the framework of their daily struggles for freedom. This critical approach is both critical against too simplified utopian solutions which may pop up from the local direct experiences of these concrete groups of people or individuals as well as critical against abstract solutions designed from a universalistic perspective devoid of the concrete situations and experiences of the people involved.

Critical theory, in the first instance, attempted to reformulate the traditional critical approach towards society formulated by Karl Marx and his followers by getting rid of the exclusive focus on materialist (economic) conditions and of the idea that only the proletarian class would be able to enforce emancipation by general revolt. In addition, the focus of the critique shifted from the stagnating and alienating tendencies of the capitalist economy towards the more general expansive and extractive dynamics of capitalism, which destroys not just humans but also natural resources and nature in general. At the same time, the ideological critique of morals and culture of the bourgeois society was nuanced and refined by means of psychoanalysis and cultural analysis. At the same time, the inherent tendency towards fascism, identified by Marx, was differentiated by analysing how unconscious instinctual propulsive energies may be channelled, leading people to experience their oppression as ‘liberation’ and to strive for it. See e.g. Adorno’s (2019) The Authoritarian Personality.

In the 1930s, the research of the Institute for Social Research developed a coherent critical theoretical approach focusing on how bodies are entirely subjectified through the rule of rational administrations and organisations and how repressive modes of socialisation as well as social control, which permeated virtually all areas of social life and was exercised through the mass media, contribute to it. All these elements were seen as inherently associated with modernity and enlightenment, suggesting a rather negative conceptualisation of the original emancipatory project of enlightenment. Paradigmmatically, this is exemplified in Horkheimer and Adorno’s (2007) Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which both aspects of enlightenment are described in their mutual (dialectic) relationship. This seminal work became a cult classic of the 1968 student protests. The work expresses a profound cultural pessimism that must be viewed against the backdrop of history (Nazism, communism, capitalism) at that time. The authors tried to demonstrate that reason can turn into unreason, and progress into regression. In doing so, they opposed blind faith in progress and the Enlightenment. They argue that the
Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason and progress, aiming to free the world from the spell of superstition and mythology, has led to the domination of nature and the suppression of human individuality. Instead, Adorno suggested the notion of negative dialectics as a critique of the positive, idealistic dialectics of Hegel and the Marxist dialectical materialism that grew out of it. Negative dialectics rejects the idea of a final synthesis or reconciliation of contradictions, instead emphasising the importance of maintaining the tension between contradictory elements and resisting the temptation to subsume particulars under supposedly idealistic, abstract, totalizing concepts.

For Horkheimer and Adorno, the Enlightenment itself has turned into mythology. As rationality spread, humankind has increasingly become alienated from human nature through the development of the economically rational capitalist and liberal economic system. The individual cannot identify with the main purpose of economic development anymore and becomes totally subordinated to the economic powers, as Marx suggested. Horkheimer and Adorno, however, describe how this alienation is not limited to the economic sphere, but also extends to cultural life, mass media, and the way society is organised in general.  In addition, humankind is not just alienated from human nature but also from nature in general. Human beings and nature then become merely objects of domination and manipulation. There is no real progress: rather than leading the individual to freedom, the Enlightenment has merely created new forms of slavery and a totally administered world. Religion has been replaced by bourgeois morality, which, however, cannot provide people with social security. Modern mass culture has become a product of industrial production and serves as an instrument of social control. The exclusion of opposing groups, like Anti-Semitism, has become a defining feature of modern barbarism, into which people are sinking despite – or perhaps precisely because of – the Enlightenment. ‘The Dialectic of Enlightenment’ of Horkheimer and Adorno, as the main proponents of Critical Theory, offered a razor-sharp analysis of the contemporary world of its time, without, however, offering a solution or a way out of the predicament.

II. Habermas’ Actualisation of Critical Theory

Jürgen Habermas (1984) is often seen as representative of the second generation of Critical Theorists, and, as can be derived from my publications, he has been an important source of inspiration for me. He attempted to bring the (positive) ideal of enlightenment back into societal reality and to avoid reducing enlightenment to a (negative) totalising project of domination and subjectivation. He designed an extended version of the modernist concept of reason and rationality, which is not limited to sheer instrumental rationality, and he re-aligned critical social theory with the empirical social sciences. He remained faithful to the critical project, but reformulated the categorical framework and criteria for critical analysis of society by inferring ‘reason’ and ‘rationality’ from the real-life communicative practices of subjects and from their practical use of language as the main means for non-violent human interaction. This extended concept of rationality does not depend on individual subjectivism or a transcendental consciousness but is rooted in intersubjectivism. In addition, his concept of society refers to both the broader systemic- as well as to the ‘local’ lifeworld level. Through argumentative interaction and understanding, both the lifeworld as well as the system world are continuously socially (re-)constructed and looses its totalising feature. By analysing the pathologies of modern societies, or, those situations in which the system world tends to dominate the lifeworld and is limiting the communicative rationalisation of society, and by the rational critical reflection of the results, in his view, steps towards the transformation of society can be made and modernity can be developed further instead of giving up the project of progressive enlightenment as a whole, as the first generation of Critical Theorists seemed to suggest.

III. Current Positioning of Critical Theory

The current situation is different from the situation in which the first-generation critical theorist developed their ideas and also different from the times in which Habermas re-conceptualised Critical Theory. Already, Horkheimer suggested that Critical Theory is part of the historical development and needs to transform itself over time. Horkheimer’s own ideas were developed during an era of totalitarian capitalism, the paradigmatic expression of which was found in the economic system of Nazism. Later on, in the 1970s and 80s, Habermas tried to develop these ideas further by analysing the new conditions of the more progressive forms of capitalist societies. He reflected on the post-war welfare state and on how the institutional network of the rule of law and, more generally, democratic institutions could regulate capitalism and deal with its imminent crises. Nowadays, however. the capitalist welfare state is gradually undermined by expanding global capitalism and has weakened the democratic system, which increasingly gives way to a post-factual populist politics which refers more to emotions than to arguments to explain why justice, equality and sustainability cannot be reached. In addition, hitherto certain fields of domination were by and large left out from the main thrust of Critical Theory, which have grown in importance nowadays. One may think of the fields of ethnic, racial, and colonial, as well as gender relations. It is very much an open question how, under these circumstances, Critical Theory needs to be transformed and needs to re-invent itself.

IV. Perspective for further Development of Critical Theory

The former lines of Critical Theory are to a large degree still valid, even though their normative criteria are increasingly under scrutiny.  But these lines of critical thought need to be enhanced with new forms of critique and need to include the interaction between these lines, respectively the interaction between the different societal mechanisms of domination in these different fields.

Thus the task of criticism will be to decipher, articulate and theoretically unearth the normative horizon that is expressed in experiences of the violation or disregard of justice, equality, freedom and autonomy of human beings. It is these norms which animate and drive those struggles and social protests, as well as the various forms of social resistance against the different manifestations of oppression and injustice, inequality and domination.

These normative guiding principles act as driving forces that permeate society and, at the same time, spur it on to look beyond itself and its current configurations by questioning the distorted images of freedom and autonomy that have been shaped by the very dynamics of modern societies, to turn them into a critique of the various forms and relations of domination, of the actual exclusions and of the forms of oppression in today’s societies. These struggles may be endless and may never lead us to a state of justice, freedom and equality. Nevertheless, they will enable us to make societies – and, more generally, the world in which we live – a little more liveable, by allowing a few islands of autonomy to emerge, even if these may never be able to develop into an entire continent or an entire world (Leyva, 2026, p. 195f.).

References

Adorno, T.W. (2019 [1950]) The Authoritarian Personality. Verso, London.

Habermas, J. (1984)  Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalisation of Society & Vol. 2:  Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Beacon, Boston.

Horkheimer, M. (2002 [1937]) Traditional and Critical Theory. In: Horkheimer, M. Critical Theory. Selected Essays. Continuum, New York (pp. 188-252).

Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T.W. (2007 [1947 in German]) Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford University Press, Redwood City.

Leyva, G. (2026) Kritische Theorie. Projekt, Probleme, Perspektiven. [Critical Theory. Project, problems, perspectives. In: Gros, A., Dreher, J. & Rosa, H. (eds.) Phänomenologie und Kritische Theorie [Phenomenology and Critical Theory]. Suhrkamp, Berlin. (pp. 163-196).

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Our Certainties and Doubts

In our current ego centred society, it seems important to have a strong profile, otherwise, one is not seen nor heard. One needs to be convinced of oneself and maybe even a bit narcissistic to appear front stage. But with 7.8 billion ‘egos’ on this globe in 2021 it is quite an effort to stick your head out, and to be someone and to survive in the struggle for attention. It was already Georg Simmel (1903) in his famous essay on the “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, who noted that on the one side, the dense and anonymous urban life creates the liberty to be who one likes to be and to not be pigeonholed by the rigid structures of a closed community, but that on the other side of that same coin, one needs to put a lot of effort in gaining a recognised position and identity in these same anonymous urban settings. These kinds of urban conditions seem now to have become ‘planetary’, and in our daily life, we seek our own place and identity, our own certainty of who we are and what we stand for,  while at the same time we try to avoid being pinpointed and fixed, and we try to overcome our current situation and envision an alternative future. We thus also question and doubt our current position. We are torn between our assumed certainties and hopeful doubts.

I, myself never had the self-confidence of a strong ego, and always felt the doubts and the struggle for recognition. Having lived at many different places, where one, over and over again, needed to find one’s own position again, and maybe as a side-effect, I also was lacking the expressive eloquence to state the ideas I stand for loud and clear, the constant struggle for who-we-are became very apparent to me. Although science and an academic career was never my pre-set goal, when it by coincidence happened to me, also legitimised my doubts and my continuous search for my own convictions. In science, it is our profession to always ask critical questions and to scrutinise all presupposed certainties. Science is not about finding final answers, but about continuously posing questions. This also resounds in the, for me so inspiring, philosophical anthropology of Helmuth Plessner, who states that we cannot essentialise who we as human being, or as a single person are. We are the undetermined being (homo absconditus), and as a consequence, we continuously need to (re-)create ourselves. But of course one cannot profile oneself without an audience. Who we are is, therefore, not the result of a lonely creative act, but of creative inter-actions, it is a social construction, it is ‘teamwork’. Who we are, what we know, and what we stand for is created in interaction and in team-work. We never do this alone. This also coined my vision on the development of scientific knowledge in general. The core of what we do as scientists is to express to our audience what we claim to know and invite others to scrutinise these claims and come up with better and new ideas. Although we are very aware of all the shortcomings of the current scientific institutions and practices in this respect, it is still the core of knowledge production. Based on these ideas, it might not be surprising that also the Theory of Communicative Rationalisation of Jürgen Habermas (1985), and similar later ideas, such as those of Axel Honneth et al. (2017), have been a source for inspiration for me. But since doubt is also inherent in the social construction of knowledge, also the enemies of these ideas became dear to me, and helped me to understand my own position, and to also discover the shortcomings of my own and their tentative ‘truths’. The continuous struggle and partly even conflict is the core of the production of knowledge and wisdom (see also the work of my colleagues at our own Department: Landau, 2019 and van Leeuwen, 2007). This is also well reflected in the following quote of the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl G. Jung:

But current times are rather refractory to this scientific process of jointly making sense of the world around us. The individualisation in the assessment of our scientific production denies the social- and team efforts involved. The exaggerated celebrity and ‘excellence’ culture around certain ‘stars’ in science suppress the productive force of doubts and critique. The publish or perish culture forces scientists to stay within the comfortable and well-established mainstreams of thought instead of delving into more marginal critical approaches. Of course, being critical is not necessarily better than being mainstream, but it is the debate between them, which should be the core of our scientific endeavours. Relativisation and scrutinisation of our own and other’s position are not appreciated. Being a critical mind, even within an academic setting does not contribute to our career. University administrations rather prefer tame and easy-going functionaries, who do not ask uneasy questions. What is true for academia is also true in general in society and in governance. Also there we do not seem to cherish the doubt and debate, or openness and recognition of others, sufficiently. Simple undisputed truths and ‘leaders’ who forcefully express and apply these truths are called for by many populist movements. Former US President Donald Trump fulfilled that role with fervour, while Barack Obama, as expressed in his latest book, was blamed to be hesitant and doubting. Robert Putnam in his famous book with the title Bowling Alone, addresses how in society one increasingly seems to lose the ability to engage with political inter-action and debate, to engage in the dialectics of certainty and doubt. To reinstall or revive our ability to find wisdom in the social interaction and scientific debate is however more than re-creating a community of equally minded people as an immunised comfort zone, within which we can find confirmation of what we already thought to know.  As Helmuth Plessner argues in his The Limits of Community: A Critique of Social Radicalism (1999), it demands to actively engage with the ‘other’ with the ‘unknown’ and ‘uncertain’ and to actively position one-self and one’s convictions in between certainty and doubt. Of course we can also interpret the mutual identification and recognition of ourselves and our potential opponents as a kind of ‘knowledge’ community in which also disagreement may persist, but which nevertheless could lead each of us to new insights.

References

Habermas, J. (1985) The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, and Vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Beacon, Boston.

Honneth, A.,  Rancière, J., Genel, K., & Deranty, J-Ph. (2017) Recognition or Disagreement. A Critical Encounter on the Politics of Freedom, Equality, and Identity. Columbia University Press, New York.

Krüger, H.P. (2019) Homo Absconditus: Helmuth Plessners Philosophische Anthropologie Im Vergleich. [Homo Absconditus: Helmuth Plessners philosophical anthropology in comparison]. de Gruyter, Berlin.

Landau, F. (2019) Agonistic Articulations in the ‘Creative’ City. Routledge, Abingdon.

Leeuwen B. van (2007) A Formal Recognition of Social Attachments: Expanding Axel Honneth’s Theory of Recognition. Inquiry. Vol. 50, No. 2, pp.  180-205.

Plessner, H. (1999 [1924]) The Limits of Community: A Critique of Social Radicalism. Humanities Press, Amherst.

Putnam, R.D. (2000) Bowling Alone. The collapse and revival of American community. Simon & Shuster, New York.

Simmel, G. (1976 [1903]) The Metropolis and Mental Life. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Free Press, New York.

 

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Plagiarism and Examination Board

On the first of September 2020, I will step down as Chair of the Examination Board of Geography, Spatial Planning, and Environmental Politics of the Radboud University. I fulfilled this task for more than 15 years, which is even longer than then official mandate for this position, to allow my successor to get acquainted with this task.

The main task of the Examination Board is to apply the rules and regulations of the four academic programmes, for which the examination board is responsible. This sounds rather bureaucratic and boring, but in my own experience, this certainly does not need to and should not be the case, if one takes a bit of a closer look at the responsibilities of the Examination Board.

The rules and regulations of our educational programmes are operationalisations of certain values and norms, which are central in academia. But as general rules and regulations, they always miss the crucial individual elements and circumstances of each specific case. So the art of doing a good job in the Examination Board is not in following the letter of the law but to judge, by the spirit of the law, by the moral principles, which are at the base of these laws, rules, and regulations. This then leads to more substantial justice within our educational programmes.

Although spatial justice is a common theme in the field of Geography, Spatial Planning, and Environmental Politics, it is not very common to reflect more deeply on the development of these moral principles. I, myself was mainly inspired by the work of Jürgen Habermas, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Carol Gilligan to reflect on the ethics of values and moral judgments, which learned me to look at each case from a ‘post-conventional’ perspective in which also aspects of care are taken into account.

 

Although given the debate and insights on these issues in philosophy and science this might sound self-evident, in the practices of many Examination Boards, in the current times in which bureaucracies do not except own responsibilities nor provide trust in substantial judgments, but instead seek full control and zero tolerance, it is certainly not common sense. In similar ways currently, universities and faculties seem to seek further standardisation and centralisation. This is in certain respects a way back to moral judgments at the conventional level at a greater distance to the actual educational practices, retreating from the more substantial justice and post-conventional moral judgments. Happily, as examination board, we have been able to resist these tendencies.

Also, the Dutch law for Higher Education protects the right of the Examination Board to divert from the general rules and regulations, in individual cases, and thus to practice post-conventional substantial justice. In this respect, the work of the Examination Board is a very responsible job, in which one can also set a certain tone, and style, which constructively contributes to the good practices within an educational programme. I always enjoyed to do this responsible work and with which we indeed co-determine the good practices and general tone, much more than being in committees or other bodies which only need to do what they are told to do.

For example, I always interpreted the responsibility of the Examination Board to judge the admission of students to our programmes in a very liberal way. I noticed that increasingly our university system tends to determine the quality of its graduates, by being very strict in admitting students to even start the programme. To a certain degree that is of course justified, since one should not admit any students who do not have the capacity to finish the programme successfully. But on the other hand, in doing so we often seem to forget, that it is our task as educators, to bring those students who do not have the knowledge and skills at the beginning of the programme yet to the level of knowledge and skills which we would require from our graduates. This is the core of formation. So being very strict with the admission of new students, is in a way making things easy for us by selecting those students who also without our help as educators would anyhow reach graduation easily. The real effort of an educational programme and a real educational achievement is it if we can bring those who do not already have the necessary knowledge and skills to graduation level. It is actually these cases which make us as lecturers proud of our work and of our students. Teaching is and should be a challenge. Being rather generous in our admission policy continuously challenges us but also feeds our proudness and is a real contribution to formation, which is expressed at the graduation ceremonies, which are also an important responsibility of the Examination Board.

Another example is the issue of plagiarism, with which the examination board is increasingly confronted, not in the last place also because of the current Covid-19 crisis with the sudden transformation of our teaching towards online teaching and online assessment. Of course, rules and regulations about plagiarism are clear and should be respected. But, if one reflects a bit more on how the use of sources has changed over times, one gets another picture.

When I was studying as a student at university, the internet did not exist yet. Copy machines at that time slowly but surely became available. Searching for scientific sources was a tedious job. Cycling from one library to the other, digging through thousands of library index cards, to identify the right source, then noticing that that specific source one was looking for was at that moment lent out, and therefore one needed to return weeks later to pick it up. Going through those sources and maybe make a photocopy of only those parts which were most relevant, because one could not afford to copy more. Also visiting these libraries, with these immense numbers of books, representing the condensed world knowledge, impressed us, and made us pay respect to these sources which were so valuable and hard to access.

When I was visiting the famous library of the monastery in St. Gall in Switzerland last week again, I once again became aware of this respect, as one automatically becomes very silent and modest in such a breathtaking place.

But compare this with how currently sources are ubiquitously available to students, in digital form, accessible at any time from everywhere. Without making a difference between fake or untrustworthy sources and thorough high-quality sources. Copying these sources or parts of them is then only one click away. And indeed in some of these sources that what the student tends to express in their paper is formulated in such a beautiful way, that it becomes very tempting to copy and paste. Totally wrong and reprehensible of course, and indeed the Examination Board is tough in these cases, but on the other hand one does understand, where this comes from, which does make a difference in our judgment.

In this way, the Examination Board has an important impact on the style and tone of educational practices and is partly responsible for the ‘moral place making’, of this specific place for academic education and formation.

References:

  • Gilligan, C. (1982) In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Harvard University Press, Boston.
  • Habermas, J. (1985) Philosophical Notes on Moral Judgement Theory. In: Lind, G., Hartman, A. & Wakenhut, R. (eds.) Moral Development and the Social Environment: Studies in the Philosophy and Psychology of Moral Judgement and Education. Precedent, Chicago (pp. 3-20).
  • Kohlberg, L., Levine, C., Hewer, A. (eds.) (1983) Moral Stages: A Current Formulation and a Response to Critics. Karger, Basle.